Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a printing apparatus, and more particularly, to a three-dimensional (3-D) printing apparatus.
Description of Related Art
With advances of the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), a brand new three-dimensional printing technology (3-D printing technology) has been developed in the manufacturing industry, which can very quickly fabricate a physical solid object based on an original concept design. The 3-D printing, in fact, is a general term of a series of rapid prototyping technologies (RP technologies) and the basic principle thereof is a laminate manufacturing, where an RP machine scans a prototype work piece along a plurality of X-Y planes to obtain a plurality of cross-section shapes of the work piece. Meanwhile, the probe intermittently displaces in Z coordinate with a step of a slice thickness layer by layer so as to ultimately form the 3-D object. The 3-D printing is unrestricted for the geometric shapes with the prototype, and the more complex the work piece is, the more excellences the RP technology shows so as to largely save the labor and the process time As a result, a digital 3-D model given by the computer-aided design (CAD) can be truthfully revealed under a shortest time requirement, and the model is, not only palpable, but also truly felt for its geometric curves. Once the user obtain the 3-D model, people can trial the assembling performance thereof, and even can do possible functional test thereof.
However, with the current 3-D printing apparatus for using the above-mentioned RP technique to form a 3-D object, after reading the digital 3-D model made by the computer software, the 3-D printing apparatus can directly perform 3-D printing tasks. Thus, if the fabricated 3-D object does not meet the requirement, the 3-D object must be discard, followed by re-modifying the digital 3-D model to print again. In short, the current 3-D printing apparatus is quite inconvenient with using and operation, even causes the material waste so as to potentially increase the cost of production.